Monday, July 18, 2016

8 months

Looking studious.

Dear family and friends,

Where
has the time gone! Okay, so I understood when everyone was telling me
before I left that the mission would pass by super fast, faster than any
other time in my life. But I wasn't expecting like this. Like in my
mind we are still in March or April, but in reality I am about a month
away from turning 20.

This
week for us has been very uneventful. We had to stay in the house for
two days because my companion got super sick, like he couldn't walk
without feeling like his head was going to explode. The poor guy was in
bed the entire time, but then he started to get better towards the end
of the week and at the very end of the week we worked and worked and
worked and ended up making some good up and finding some really
promising families. And this week we are looking forward to playing
catch up and getting the ball rolling again!!

{This is in response to questions about the living conditions in his city:}

So
the part of Arica that I live in is like basically government homes.
Like the government hires a big company to build just a TON of cookie
cutter homes and then after the people get their homes assigned by the
government. I still haven't seen a normal home like there are in the
states. Even for the upper middle class air conditioning just doesn't
exist. Hot water heaters are pretty rare too. I have never seen a cloths
dryer here yet. They just don't exist here, everyone just air dries.

Right now I have hot water but tanks of gas are expensive and if we run
out during the month we have to wait until we get more money at the
first of the month to buy more. Yes we have someone to do our laundry
here. We live with members in the upstairs and it is so small. The bedroom and room we have to study in and the bathroom all
together are about the size of the dinning room in our house, its very
different and I would like to change. And for most of the other
missionaries in the mission, basically all of them live in a house or
apartment but hot water is hit and miss everywhere